A word from the designer

Gitorious went through some “rather big changes”=http://blog.gitorious.org/2009/05/09/weve-made-a-few-changes/ one month ago (11th. of May). Among them was the new relationship with “Shortcut”=http://www.shortcut.no/. And as a part of these new changes we are now going to do something with the graphical interface as well. We want Gitorious to look more like a complete product, with better focus on each page’s functionality. And, of course, we want it to look good.

This week Gitorious.org took it’s first step towards this new facelift. We started with the launching a new front page. Here it is!

<bilde: gitorious_screen.png>

At the first glance it may look completely different from the old one. But it’s not really, the content is the same. Our mission was to keep the content, just rearranging and redesigning it. Let’s go through the things we did.

Here’s how the front page has been for the last month. To the right you see how the content was laid out, in content sections from A to E.

Since it’s the _front_ page we wanted the main top area to include both the Gitorious-logo and the pay-off. And we wanted it big. So section A and B got combined, and we put a register button and a log in-box right in your face. This kind of front page (with the big, black header) is very suitable for more pages in gitorious, like your logged in-front page, a project’s front page etc. But most of gitorious.org will have a smaller header, like before.

The old page was full of lists (section C and D) with different purposes. Section A’s list was the 25 latest changes done in any project in Gitorious. There is allways a user doing something, and watching that list can be quite interesting. And even more important, it’s a great way of shoving the level of activity we have.

We wanted to keep the list, but make it stick out from the rest. We also found out that only the last few activities was a interesting read, and mainly the time-stamp. So we made a ticker-bar, shoving only the 8 latest. And to make it even more hasty it’s now dynamic, updating every time somethng happens.

In section D we had 6 lists:

* Active projects (last two weeks)

* Active projects (overall)

* Most active repository clones

* Active teams

* Active users

* Latest projects

It is cool to see who’s _king of the hill_, who is most active, and witch project, but these lists were killing each other. We wanted only three. The way we saw it, it’s all about users working on projects, so I was sure to have those two lists. (Cutting the three original project lists down to the last two weeks-one.)

To compliment them we went for teams instead of repositories. We hope that people would like to see themselves climbing on the lists on the front page. We want to appeal to their competitive instincts. And I think the teams-list is cut out for that (for those who appear on it). Teams like that, is also something we are very pleased having in Gitorious.

I hope you enjoy what we’re trying to do. If you have any comments or good ideas, please post them below.

Cheers

John Eivind, interaction designer

Gitorious went through some rather big changes one month ago (11th. of May). Among them was the new relationship with Shortcut. And as a part of these new changes we are now going to do something with the graphical interface as well. We want Gitorious to look more like a complete product, with better focus on each page’s functionality. And, of course, we want it to look good.

This week Gitorious.org took it’s first step towards this new facelift. We started with the launching of a new front page. Here it is!

At the first glance it may look completely different from the old one. But it’s not really, the content is the same. Our mission was to keep the content, just rearranging and redesigning it. Let’s go through the things we did.

Here’s how the front page has been for the last month. To the right you see how the content was laid out, in content sections from A to E.

Since it’s the front page we wanted the main top area to include both the Gitorious-logo and the pay-off. And we wanted it big. So section A and B got combined, and we put a register button and a log in-box right in your face. This kind of front page (with the big, black header) is very suitable for more pages in gitorious, like your logged in-front page, a project’s front page etc. But most of gitorious.org will have a smaller header, like before.

The old page was full of lists (section C and D) with different purposes. Section A’s list was the 25 latest changes done in any project in Gitorious. There is allways a user doing something, and watching that list can be quite interesting. And even more important, it’s a great way of shoving the level of activity we have.

We wanted to keep the list, but make it stick out from the rest. We also found out that only the last few activities was a interesting read, and mainly the time-stamp. So we made a ticker-bar, shoving only the 8 latest. And to make it even more alive it’s now dynamic, updating every time something happens.

In section D we had 6 lists:

Active projects (last two weeks)

Active projects (overall)

Most active repository clones

Active teams

Active users

Latest projects

It is cool to see who’s king of the hill, who is most active, and witch project, but these lists were killing each other. We wanted only three. The way we saw it, it’s all about users working on projects, so I was sure to have those two lists. (Cutting the three original project lists down to the last two weeks-one.)

To compliment them we went for teams instead of repositories. We hope that people would like to see themselves climbing on the lists on the front page. We want to appeal to their competitive instincts. And I think the teams-list is cut out for that (for those who appear on it). Teams like that, is also something we are very pleased having in Gitorious.

In the last section E, the footer, we haven’t done much at all. But there is a trend shift going on, in the world of footers (as you can see in this Smashing Magazine-article), so who knows what we’ll try there.

I hope you enjoy what we’re trying to do. If you have any comments or good ideas, please post them below.

Can you tell me more about your system, so that I can look into why it’s being slow? I have only tested the scrolling on my co-workers’ new and shiny machines, where the scrolling doesn’t cause any slow-downs, so I can’t immediately think of anything that causes the lag.

I hope this blog is still active. I see it resides in a folder for 2009. However, a great blog for web layout design. If you need help in web design layouts or questions of any kind for web design, Colorado Web Design can help.